Contents

Plot

The film opens in 1928 in New York State, where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
(Steenburgen) advises her husband that her last book was rejected
by a publisher, and she has bought an orange grove in Florida and is leaving him to
go there. She drives to the nearest town alone, and arrives in time
for her car to die. Local resident Norton Baskin (Peter Coyote)
takes her the rest of the distance to a dilapidated and overgrown
cabin attached to an even more overgrown orange grove. Despite
Baskin's (and her own) doubts, she stays and begins to fix up the
property.

The local residents of "the Creek" begin to interact with her.
Marsh Turner (Rip Torn) comes around with his daughter Ellie (Dana
Hill), a teenage girl who keeps a deer fawn as a pet she has named
Flag. A black woman, Geechee (Woodard), arrives and offers to work
for her, despite the fact that Rawlings insists she cannot pay her
much. The grove languishes below her expectations and Rawlings
writes another novel, hoping to get it published. A very young
married couple arrives to inhabit a cabin on Rawlings' property.
The woman is very pregnant and they both reject Rawlings' attempts
to help them.

Rawlings employs the assistance of a few of the Creek residents,
Geechee and Baskin, to unblock a vital irrigation vein for her
grove, and it begins to improve. The young couple has their child.
Ellie's deer grows older and escapes her pen, and Marsh foretells
that the deer will have to be killed for eating all their food.
Geechee's husband comes to stay with her after being released from
prison, and Rawlings offers him a place to work in her grove, but
he refuses and Rawlings fires him. Even though her husband drinks
and gambles, Geechee goes to leave with him, and Rawlings admits
she will be sad to see Geechee leave, after Geechee demands to know
why Rawlings would allow a friend to make such a mistake. Geechee
decides to stay after all after telling Rawlings that she should
know how to treat her friends better.

Rawlings submits her novel, a gothic romance, to Max
Perkins, and it is rejected again. He writes her in return to
tell her to write him stories about the people she describes so
well in her letters, instead of the popular English governess
stories she has been writing. She does so immediately, beginning
with telling the story of the young married couple (eventually
becoming "Jacob's Ladder" published in Scribner's Magazine in 1931).
During a visit to the Turner's home on Ellie's 14th birthday, Flag
escapes his pen once more and Marsh is forced to shoot him after he
has eaten the family's vegetables. Ellie screams at him in hatred,
and Marsh goes on a bender, goes into town and attracts the
attention of the sheriff. The sheriff finds Marsh drinking moonshine with a shotgun
across his lap, and demands the gun. When Marsh offers it to him,
the sheriff shoots him (the story eventually becoming the basis for
The Yearling).

Max Perkins visits and accepts her story (Jacob's Ladder) upon
reading it. Baskin asks Rawlings to marry him, which she accepts
after much hesitation about her independence. Rawlings realizes her
profound attachment to the land at Cross Creek.

Production
notes

Cross Creek was filmed in and near Micanopy,
Florida. At the beginning of the film, Steenburgen as Rawlings
asks a gentleman in a rocking chair where the post office is, and
he points her in the right direction. The gentleman in the rocking
chair was Norton Baskin, Rawlings' husband.